Things like ping pong tables, free beer - those are bad for family life. They encourage you to stay at the office for more than your 40 hours - of course in many places the idea of a 40 hour week seems like a joke. If you want to encourage family life you need to encourage going home and not thinking about work at all.
My company has a branch office near LA. I asked someone there once why they don't move just a few hours north to the Bay - they could easially double their salary. There was no interest in that though - the LA office you arrive to work sometime around 9 or 9:30, take a lunch break, and if you if you are not clearly preparing to leave at 6pm they remind you to turn the lights off when you leave. (that is you are allowed to work later if you want but it is expected that you won't) That is worth far more than the extra money that they could make and so we have a lot of people who have been in that office for 20 years.
scotty79 · 14m ago
> you need to encourage going home and not thinking about work at all
Why would any company encourage that? The only use that business had with people having family was that having family put workers at a disadvantage, pressed them against the wall, forced them to suffer through even more exploitation than they would if they were childless. Make them existentially fear even trying to look for other opportunities. And give them a place to escape the burden of care of their children.
nickff · 8m ago
Many companies encourage employees to go home and relax or engage in other rewarding activities; it can be very beneficial for the employer. For one thing, it encourages people to separate their work lives and home lives, which can decrease stress (often encouraging productivity and increasing tenure), as well as encouraging people to treat their office as somewhere to focus on work (to the exclusion of distractions). Additionally, in many fields it can be helpful to get a fresh perspective on your work every day, rather than getting tunnel-vision, which can happen from having your 'head down' all the time.
wubrr · 4m ago
It sounds good and ostensibly makes sense, and many companies claim they do these things, just like many companies claim to have unlimited PTO.
How many actually sincerely follow through on these claims?
I've yet to encounter a single one.
nickff · 2m ago
It’s uncommon in startups and companies focused on high-growth (such as the FAANGs). Older, smaller, and more stable companies tend to have more of this orientation, but it usually comes with significantly lower compensation.
bluGill · 2m ago
I personally have less than 40 hours of week of good code in me. I've tried programming more than that many times, and I can do it for a few days but then I burn out and and less productive. So by encouraging me to not think about work outside of work hours they get more out of me when I'm at work.
FollowingTheDao · 5m ago
>Why would any company encourage that?
Exactly which is why this article is so useless and misunderstands capitalism and does not know economic law. Corporations can never be family friendly becasue it is antagonistic to profit and therefor in direct violation to shareholders rights.
See Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., 170 N.W. 668 (Mich. 1919)
“A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits or to the non-distribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes.“
bluGill · 26s ago
> Corporations can never be family friendly becasue it is antagonistic to profit and therefor in direct violation to shareholders rights.
This can be false (can, not is!). When good employees demand family live then the company that gives it to them can get those good employees. There are good employees who are willing to settle for less money if the company allows for a good family life and so the company makes more money. (hint you won't find many of them in the Bay area, but if you can expand your reach to other cities they are not uncommon)
exolymph · 37m ago
Key quote:
> My peers in tech who are reluctant to have children often express fear that it will interrupt the arc of the careers they've worked so hard to build.
> That, I think, is the primary tension: not between the family and the state, as Boyle argues, but between individual and collective ambitions. Both the state and the family ask us to make sacrifices for something bigger than ourselves — and this, perhaps, is why they have historically fought each other for mindshare. What tech offers is the opposite: a chance to realize a vision that is entirely one's own. Tech worships individual talent, and it's a unique thrill to live and work among peers who don't shy away from greatness. But it also means that tech has to work harder than other industries to demonstrate that starting a family doesn't require giving up these ambitions.
I'm the breadwinner in my family, and my husband is a SAHD. I have a 2yo and I'm 6 months pregnant with our second. Stereotypically, having a kid made me care less about professional ambitions — but I don't care zero. And as the breadwinner, earning money, ideally more money every couple years or so, is a high priority. God, the pressure to keep up. It's hard to balance with being a present mom.
I live in the SF Bay Area and being able to attend events and network in person has been a huge boon to my career. Being "in the scene" pays off. I can't really do that anymore, not without losing time with my kid, and I'm just not willing to make the sacrifice. Traveling to conferences, etc., is even more off the table. Don't even talk to me about commuting. But I know these lifestyle changes will have repercussions next time I need to find a job.
To secure jobs with the kind of flexibility I require as a mom, I need to be a high performer, an impressive candidate with plenty of connections. Being a mom makes it harder — more expensive, let's say — to be that kind of exceptional worker bee. Oy vey!
toomuchtodo · 22m ago
I’m always taken aback when people in power denigrate remote and flexible work, as if it’s lazy or incompatible with an organization succeeding. If you want people to have families and lean into them, they need this work arrangement. Remote and flexible work has been shown to be very beneficial to parents and working mothers specifically. Several other countries protect this as a worker right. There’s over $120B in remote first or highly remote compatible enterprises. But you still have the bros, from Silicon Valley to Jamie Dimon in finance, dragging people back in for the performance art. I hope the right people get into positions of power soon, who understand economic success and worker well-being go hand in hand.
It shouldn’t taboo to say “I’m here to do good work, but then I’m going home; my job is not who I am, but merely a means to a reasonable amount of economic and professional success.” We have to enable people do their best work with reasonable accommodations.
bluGill · 14m ago
Remote and flexible are nice, but not what is needed. What is needed is consistency and not too many hours. You have to be expected to not work or party late because you will be with the family. You have to be expected to work the same first shift schedule - that is the kids are in school or in child care when you are working (child care for young kids is expensive enough that one parent staying home until the kids are school aged looks really good, so support for going back to work after that is useful).
There needs to be one parent with flexibility, but it doesn't matter which. Just so that when a kid is sick at least one parent able to not go into the office. Most people reading this will have a job that can be done okay from home between cleaning vomit up and so it makes sense for us to get that flexibility. However there are a lot of jobs that must be in person (you can't work an assembly line from home)
toomuchtodo · 13m ago
We don’t have to agree on the remote and flexible part, but I agree with reduced hours and am an aggressive advocate of the 4 day week (8x4 @ 100% pay).
foobarian · 2m ago
There is a huge element of hubris at play. Founders are highly competitive and high achieving people, who imagine their teams to be like leading NFL football teams where there is no room for members who are not absolutely dedicated. Working a 40-hour work week is not compatible with that. As a result perhaps these kind of companies are self selecting, and it's rare to find a leader who is willing to say the equivalent of, "hey, you know, it's OK to be a loser team and not work 100 hour weeks"
exolymph · 5m ago
Honestly, I do think there are advantages to in-person work, in terms of team cohesion, serendipity, etc. That said, 1) I don't care, the advantages to me of remote work vastly outweigh the advantages of working on an irl team, 2) many organizations don't set up their irl work environment to effectively maximize the benefits. But I get why employers would prefer it.
MangoToupe · 20m ago
> That, I think, is the primary tension: not between the family and the state, as Boyle argues, but between individual and collective ambitions.
I guess I don't see much difference? It would be hard to describe a family as anything other than an individual ambition in this country. The state certainly provides very little support to most people.
This in effect seems like a long-winded way of blaming people for wanting a family in the first place.
exolymph · 7m ago
Starting a family means giving up a lot of personal autonomy for the sake of a collective. A small one, compared to a company or a government, but a collective nonetheless.
monknomo · 22m ago
The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save - the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour - your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life - the greater is the store of your estranged being.
bluGill · 6m ago
I'm not sure what you are trying to say. However I will state that only religion offers any ability to save for after death - and not all of them do. If you want to save that is good, but get your religion in order (whatever that means - I don't want to open that discussion), then make sure your plan is to spend all the savings somehow. I don't care how you spend it, but enjoy life as best you can. I know some who lived a healthy active life to 104, and some who saved a lot of money for retirement but didn't live that long they were diagnosed with untreatable cancer the same month they retired). Pick your best balance between enjoying now and saving for the future.
nehal3m · 4m ago
They're quoting Marx.
adamors · 24m ago
There's no turn, this is just A16Z trying to adopt a more "family values" look for obvious reasons.
elzbardico · 9m ago
Decentralize. The US is a fucking giant place. Why all companies need to be on the same half a dozen places?
This makes housing absurdly expensive, commutes become hellish nightmares, school choices few and terrible. All things not conductive to growing families.
nemomarx · 48s ago
everyone wants access to the largest labour pool possible, to make hiring somewhat cheaper and faster. This means centralization at least among a sector (finance on the East Coast, tech on the West, etc).
if you move out to Illinois and other companies move to Kansas or Montana, how will you poach their workers? how will you fire and replace people easily? better to be concentrated for that.
jandom · 9m ago
Remote friendly is a life changer to young parents… and we saw what happened to that fairly quickly
Spooky23 · 24m ago
If you choose a life centered around career and ambition, especially in a large corporate or government sector -- you are not pro-family. That's ok.
Everyone looks at the happy people around them, and think that they can have it all, but have no idea what actually happens or doesn't. Reality is, you can't woo investors or yak at conferences on 3 continents and be meaningfully fully engaged with your kids. You try your best and make it work. If that family focused lifestyle is what you want, that's fine. But you're unlikely to be a high-flyer in a company that demands blood.
End of the day, you need to know youself, and figure out what you actually want and why. Most people keep moving to avoid doing that. Life put me in a place where I lost agency and had to make a choice, and while the circumstances sucked, I made the right choice.
nehal3m · 20m ago
Silicon Valley is pro-money and nothing else. The don't be evil rhetoric worked well to get a foot in the door but as soon as there was ever any choice between values and cash, greenbacks won. Hell, the entire industry is trying its damnedest to get rid of bodies in favour of chips. That should tell you how many fucks they give about breadwinners.
realityfactchex · 36s ago
Conspicuously absent from TFA is the #1 thing they could do, which would be to stop requiring vaccines for school or workplace.
Possibly, Silicon Valley (and the larger California) has had more exodus of (and lack of inbound) families out for this reason than most others IMHO.
Obviously, there are other factors too, and this is highly controversial (not to mention counter to the politically-correct/lagging/institutionally-endorsed position).
But to not mention this issue seems to miss something major. Or do we not talk about that?
__loam · 13m ago
When so called luminaries are calling 60 hour work weeks a good baseline, you're not pro-family.
arrosenberg · 17m ago
The only way Silicon Valley will become pro-family is if they are dragged kicking and screaming by the organized force of their workers. I'm not particularly optimistic.
alexdong · 21m ago
It can’t. And it won’t.
Yes. There are families on the fringe that tries to make it work. But it’s an exception. Not a norm.
moshegramovsky · 35m ago
A culture of greed is never good for children.
LightBug1 · 18m ago
By not pretending your work culture and colleagues are "family".
This isn't Fast and Furious, ffs
VinLucero · 10m ago
If AI enables the personalization of apps for individuals, wouldn’t it also be good at doing so for families?
Maybe there is an opportunity to create vibe coded products that fit into the rhythm of a given family.
Collective emotion as a construct for a bigger family goal is an interesting optimization problem.
Mint for tracking your family’s mental and emotional health.
My company has a branch office near LA. I asked someone there once why they don't move just a few hours north to the Bay - they could easially double their salary. There was no interest in that though - the LA office you arrive to work sometime around 9 or 9:30, take a lunch break, and if you if you are not clearly preparing to leave at 6pm they remind you to turn the lights off when you leave. (that is you are allowed to work later if you want but it is expected that you won't) That is worth far more than the extra money that they could make and so we have a lot of people who have been in that office for 20 years.
Why would any company encourage that? The only use that business had with people having family was that having family put workers at a disadvantage, pressed them against the wall, forced them to suffer through even more exploitation than they would if they were childless. Make them existentially fear even trying to look for other opportunities. And give them a place to escape the burden of care of their children.
How many actually sincerely follow through on these claims?
I've yet to encounter a single one.
Exactly which is why this article is so useless and misunderstands capitalism and does not know economic law. Corporations can never be family friendly becasue it is antagonistic to profit and therefor in direct violation to shareholders rights.
See Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., 170 N.W. 668 (Mich. 1919)
“A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits or to the non-distribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes.“
This can be false (can, not is!). When good employees demand family live then the company that gives it to them can get those good employees. There are good employees who are willing to settle for less money if the company allows for a good family life and so the company makes more money. (hint you won't find many of them in the Bay area, but if you can expand your reach to other cities they are not uncommon)
> My peers in tech who are reluctant to have children often express fear that it will interrupt the arc of the careers they've worked so hard to build.
> That, I think, is the primary tension: not between the family and the state, as Boyle argues, but between individual and collective ambitions. Both the state and the family ask us to make sacrifices for something bigger than ourselves — and this, perhaps, is why they have historically fought each other for mindshare. What tech offers is the opposite: a chance to realize a vision that is entirely one's own. Tech worships individual talent, and it's a unique thrill to live and work among peers who don't shy away from greatness. But it also means that tech has to work harder than other industries to demonstrate that starting a family doesn't require giving up these ambitions.
I'm the breadwinner in my family, and my husband is a SAHD. I have a 2yo and I'm 6 months pregnant with our second. Stereotypically, having a kid made me care less about professional ambitions — but I don't care zero. And as the breadwinner, earning money, ideally more money every couple years or so, is a high priority. God, the pressure to keep up. It's hard to balance with being a present mom.
I live in the SF Bay Area and being able to attend events and network in person has been a huge boon to my career. Being "in the scene" pays off. I can't really do that anymore, not without losing time with my kid, and I'm just not willing to make the sacrifice. Traveling to conferences, etc., is even more off the table. Don't even talk to me about commuting. But I know these lifestyle changes will have repercussions next time I need to find a job.
To secure jobs with the kind of flexibility I require as a mom, I need to be a high performer, an impressive candidate with plenty of connections. Being a mom makes it harder — more expensive, let's say — to be that kind of exceptional worker bee. Oy vey!
It shouldn’t taboo to say “I’m here to do good work, but then I’m going home; my job is not who I am, but merely a means to a reasonable amount of economic and professional success.” We have to enable people do their best work with reasonable accommodations.
There needs to be one parent with flexibility, but it doesn't matter which. Just so that when a kid is sick at least one parent able to not go into the office. Most people reading this will have a job that can be done okay from home between cleaning vomit up and so it makes sense for us to get that flexibility. However there are a lot of jobs that must be in person (you can't work an assembly line from home)
I guess I don't see much difference? It would be hard to describe a family as anything other than an individual ambition in this country. The state certainly provides very little support to most people.
This in effect seems like a long-winded way of blaming people for wanting a family in the first place.
if you move out to Illinois and other companies move to Kansas or Montana, how will you poach their workers? how will you fire and replace people easily? better to be concentrated for that.
Everyone looks at the happy people around them, and think that they can have it all, but have no idea what actually happens or doesn't. Reality is, you can't woo investors or yak at conferences on 3 continents and be meaningfully fully engaged with your kids. You try your best and make it work. If that family focused lifestyle is what you want, that's fine. But you're unlikely to be a high-flyer in a company that demands blood.
End of the day, you need to know youself, and figure out what you actually want and why. Most people keep moving to avoid doing that. Life put me in a place where I lost agency and had to make a choice, and while the circumstances sucked, I made the right choice.
Possibly, Silicon Valley (and the larger California) has had more exodus of (and lack of inbound) families out for this reason than most others IMHO.
Obviously, there are other factors too, and this is highly controversial (not to mention counter to the politically-correct/lagging/institutionally-endorsed position).
But to not mention this issue seems to miss something major. Or do we not talk about that?
Yes. There are families on the fringe that tries to make it work. But it’s an exception. Not a norm.
This isn't Fast and Furious, ffs
Maybe there is an opportunity to create vibe coded products that fit into the rhythm of a given family.
Collective emotion as a construct for a bigger family goal is an interesting optimization problem.
Mint for tracking your family’s mental and emotional health.